Category — Tips

With the combination of growing multiculturalism and increased overseas outsourcing, there is a greater demand on communication skills than ever before. Not only do you need to be able to explain yourself and understand others, but you need to do this regardless of their native tongue. Here are a few tips that I’ve found to be helpful in my dealings with people who speak another language, or have a very heavy accent that I find hard to understand.
Click for more →

To a developer, their desk is like athelete’s equipment; vital to occupation. If a hockey players stick breaks because it’s quality is sub-par they could lose a game. The same goes to a developers desk, if the desk isn’t stocked with the correct equipment it could impair the developer in their work.

Here are 10 things that every developer should have at their desk.
Click for more →

Software takes a long time to make. You first need to get the requirements from the client. Once you’ve gotten the requirements you then need to spend the time to properly design your product, drawing out paper prototypes, creating use case diagrams and other things like that.

Now that you’ve done all that, we’ll have a look at the third part of the Creating Software series: Starting to Code. Today we’ll look at different ways to code and the importance of testing as you code not afterwards.
Click for more →

Making time for the things in life that should be my priorities has always been a bit of a challenge for me. You can ask my wife if you don’t believe me. Aside from reiterating the fact that it is important to manage your time so that you can give the different areas of your life the attention they deserve, I’d also like to highlight a couple different ways to do this.

When I started college, I realized that working hard and giving a task my full effort and devotion was supremely important for success. It was evident in the results that students who were less focused and driven had achieved.

It wasn’t really until getting married that I realized just how much time I spent working, rather than doing other things. Like enjoying my life and my wife.

With that realization in the back of my mind, I started trying to do something about it, so that I can give my wife the time she deserves, spend some time playing sports and getting exercise, hanging out with friends, and fulfilling my other responsibilities in life.
Click for more →

Most programmers dread documentation. The thought of having to write anything but code makes them tremble (myself included). The reason is because it’s not what we’re good at, our job is to program, not to write docs for that code.

But what happens when our boss comes to us and asks us to write a user guide for our latest application? Below I’ll go into detail on writing great user guides.
Click for more →

Have you ever had one of those days where you can’t figure out what you’ve been doing all day long? You get home wondering where the day went, and if you’ve accomplished anything. It’s a pretty crummy feeling, and I’ve been there many, many times.

After some reflection about how my “crummy” days went, I started noticing things that really reduced my efficiency. This is a collection of my findings; the things that helped me get more done and feel good about it.
Click for more →

Creating software is difficult. You need to first get the requirements from the client (or create them yourselves), then you’ll use the requirements and design a working system. Once you’ve designed the system, turn the design into code. Next you’ll test your code to make sure it works and finally deliver the completed project to the client.

Today I’m going to look at the second part of the Creating Software series: The Design phase. There are a number of aspects to designing software. You need to take the requirements you gathered previously and start to create your software. At this point, you’ll have very little code (and possibly none at all). Don’t let this fool you though, the design phase is extremely important, and many projects have failed because they either didn’t design, or improperly designed their software.

Here are three things you can do in the design phase to make your software project more likely to succeed.
Click for more →

Continuous improvement is a simple ideology that is essentially summed up with the thought that everything should always be getting better. Incase you haven’t noticed, this is contradictive to the way the world works; things just don’t get better on their own. It takes work, often in huge amounts to get things to be better.

The first place you can look to improve is with yourself. A good improvement process is useless if you just sabotage it with your shortcomings. Take a step back and look at how the things you do affect the people around you and the situations that arise within your company. Make note of the negative ones so that you can improve on them.
Click for more →

Most software projects follow a fairly similar path from creation to completion. They start with talking to the user, getting the requirements for the project. It moves to the next stage, taking the requirements and getting them on paper (designing your software). After that, you get into coding, testing, bug fixing and more testing, and finally, you show the finished project to the client.

Now I know that I’ve outlined a fairly crude time-line but thats the basics of it. Over the next few weeks I’m going to go over each of the parts of the software project time-line and outline a few of the things that I find difficult.

Today I’m going to start off with the first in the list and also the hardest in the time-line; talking to the client and getting the requirements.
Click for more →

One of the most difficult things that I’ve had to learn over the years is how to embrace failure. It always feels…bad. It’s hard to accept, and I don’t look forward to the consequences of it.

I do like how easy it is to learn from a huge failure, though. It seems to soften the blow a bit. If it’s something you’ve not yet experienced, you will at some point in your career or your life. Mistakes happen, and you should always learn from them, and learn how not to make the same mistake again.
Click for more →